Field Noteswritten for this archive, November 10, 2026

Adult literacy in Virginia, then and now

The Institute’s pages carry three numbers about Virginia adults, and they are easy to mix up. In September 2008 a press item reported that “more than 2 million adults in Virginia struggle with basic or below basic literacy skills.” The same month, a note about the GED said one Virginian adult in six had neither a diploma nor a GED. And in March 2011 Mark Emblidge, the Institute’s director, wrote in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that nearly a million Virginia adults had never finished high school or earned the equivalency.

All three were fair readings of the data of their day. They just counted different things. This note sorts them out, then lines them up against the surveys that came after the website went quiet.

Two kinds of number

Credential counts come from the census. The American Community Survey asks each household how far its members went in school. From that you get the count of adults 25 and over who have no high school diploma or equivalent. These numbers are large samples and fairly precise. They tell you nothing about how well anyone reads.

Skill estimates come from tested samples. A few thousand adults sit with an interviewer and work through reading tasks, and statisticians scale the results up to the population. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) did this for the United States; the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) has done it since 2012. State and county figures are usually modelled from the national sample, not measured directly.

The 2008 figure of 2 million is a skill estimate. The one-in-six and nearly-a-million figures are credential counts. They overlap, but not as much as people assume. Plenty of adults who left school at sixteen read the newspaper every morning. Plenty of graduates cannot follow the dosage chart on a medicine label.

Where the 2 million came from

The VALRC staff article in Virginia Issues and Answers drew on NAAL. NAAL sorted adults into four levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate and Proficient. Nationally, 14 percent of adults scored Below Basic in prose literacy in 2003, about 30 million people, and another 29 percent scored Basic. More than half of the Below Basic group, 55 percent, had not finished high school, which is one reason diploma counts and skill counts so often get treated as one figure.

“Basic or below basic” therefore adds two groups together, and the second group is the larger one. Adults at the Basic level can read and understand short, everyday texts. They have trouble with longer documents, with forms that ask them to cross-check information, and with anything that requires an inference. In a working life that means the benefits enrollment packet, the lease, the safety manual, the letter from a child’s school. So the 2 million figure was not a claim that 2 million Virginians could not read at all. It said that a large share of the state’s adults would stall on the reading that work and family life now demand.

The Virginia Literacy Foundation, one of the Institute’s key partners and a founding one, used a narrower figure at about the same time: roughly 660,000 Virginia adults lacking basic prose literacy skills, which corresponds to the Below Basic group alone.

Where the million came from

Emblidge’s nearly-a-million figure, and the one-in-six line, came from census data. The Virginia Literacy Foundation, citing the 2006 American Community Survey, put the number of Virginia adults who never completed high school at 853,786. The 2009 Summit page added the national context: more than 40 million people over 16 in need of adult education services, according to a 2005 census report on the adult education target population, and more than 18 million over 25 without a high school credential, according to the 2007 American Community Survey.

His op-ed also made a point that the statewide figure hides. In some Virginia counties, he wrote, upwards of 45 percent of adults had no diploma or GED. The gap between Northern Virginia and parts of Southside and the southwest was, and is, very wide. That is one reason the Institute’s PlugGED In pilot started in Southwest Virginia.

What happened next

The credential count fell

Census figures have moved in the right direction since 2011. Recent American Community Survey estimates put the share of Virginia adults 25 and over without a high school diploma at about 8 to 9 percent, roughly one in twelve (8.4 percent in the 2020–2024 five-year estimates, against 10.4 percent nationally), compared with something closer to one in six or seven in the mid-2000s. Younger cohorts finish school at higher rates than the ones they are replacing, and that does most of the work. The county gaps remain.

The skill estimate did not

PIAAC tells a less comfortable story. The United States took part in rounds in 2012, 2014 and 2017, and in a second cycle of the survey in 2023. When the National Center for Education Statistics released the 2023 results in December 2024, the headline was a drop: 28 percent of U.S. adults scored at or below Level 1 in literacy, up from 19 percent in 2017. Numeracy slipped the same way, with 34 percent at or below Level 1, up from 29 percent.

PIAAC levels do not map neatly onto the old NAAL ones, so do not try to subtract one from the other. Roughly, an adult at Level 1 can read a short text on a familiar subject and find a single piece of information in it. Below Level 1, even that is uncertain. The kinds of tasks that trip people up at these levels are the same ones that stalled the NAAL “Basic” group: longer texts, several sources at once, and anything where the answer has to be worked out rather than spotted.

Nobody has a full explanation for the decline. Researchers have pointed to the share of adults who did not grow up speaking English, to the pandemic’s disruption of schooling and adult classes, to changes in how people read (screens, short messages, less sustained text), and to the switch to a fully computer-based survey. Each of these probably plays some part. What matters for Virginia is that a falling dropout count did not translate into stronger adult reading.

State and county estimates

For local figures, NCES publishes modelled estimates built from the 2012, 2014 and 2017 PIAAC samples: the PIAAC Skills Map, released in June 2020, which covers adults aged 16 to 74 in all 3,141 U.S. counties. It lets you look up a Virginia county or city and see the estimated share of adults at or below Level 1 in literacy, with a confidence range. The ranges are wide for small counties. They still show the same pattern Emblidge described: the lowest skill estimates cluster in rural Southside and Southwest Virginia and in parts of the cities.

Reading the numbers without fooling yourself

A few habits help when you meet a literacy statistic, in this archive or anywhere else.

1. Ask what was measured. A credential, a self-report (“How well do you read English?”), or a tested skill? Only the last tells you about reading.
2. Check the cut point. “Below Basic”, “Basic or below”, “at or below Level 1” and “below Level 2” are four different groups. A figure can double just by moving the line.
3. Look for the year of the data, not the year of the article. The 2008 article used 2003 data. Many figures quoted today still rest on the 2012–2017 PIAAC rounds.
4. Distrust precision at small scales. A county estimate of 23.4 percent with a range of 15 to 32 is a rough sketch.
5. Remember who is missing. Household surveys under-count people in prisons and jails, where reading levels are lower. Bill Muth’s paper in the 2006 LESLLA proceedings dealt with exactly that group, and the adults who never learned to read in any language are another one surveys miss; see Teaching adults who are new to print.

What the old pages got right

Reading the Institute’s press section in 2026 is a little strange, because the argument has hardly changed. Emblidge’s complaint in 2011 was that officials were setting targets for college credentials while ignoring adults who could not read well enough to start. Fifteen years later, state attainment goals still dominate the policy conversation, and adult education still runs on a small fraction of the funding that goes to K-12 or higher education.

The pages also got the remedy roughly right. The Institute’s projects put most of their effort into teachers: training ESOL instructors through CAELA, aligning classwork with standards through Standards in Action, coaching preschool teachers through Early Reading First. The PIAAC decline is a reminder that adult reading is not a problem that finishes itself once enough people graduate. Somebody still has to teach the adults who are here now, and then help them past the credential, which is where From GED to career pathway picks up.

Sources named in this note

• Virginia Issues and Answers, summer 2008, feature by Victoire Gerkens Sanborn and Hillary Major, as summarized on the Institute’s 2008 press page.
• Mark Emblidge, “Too Many Virginians Can’t Read This,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 13 March 2011, as summarized on the 2011 press page.
• National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2003) and Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results (December 2024).
• U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, educational attainment tables for Virginia.